Palace of the Peacock (12 page)

A challenge also to the various kinds of death or finality we accept in the absence of such a treaty. A challenge to tribalism and to fundamentalist assumptions of pure racial ancestry. As previously mentioned, the book lists and names all the members of Donne’s crew who are heading towards the Mission at Mariella. They are distinct and vivid individuals. They represent the whole spectrum from Amerindian and White West Indian to Africans of various hues, Portuguese, and several mixtures – all the people who ever came to these islands. But it is not historical identity that Harris is primarily concerned to establish: “The whole crew was one spiritual family living and dying together in a common grave out of which they had sprung again from the same soul and womb as it were. They were all knotted and bound together in the enormous bruised head of Cameron’s ancestry and nature as in the white unshaven
head of Schomburg’s age and presence.”
Palace
of
the
Peacock
is the first clear expression of the existence and the
desirability
of our cross-culturalism.

The dreamer realises that he and Donne and Donne’s crew are all in the same boat, on the same quest, dying and being born over and over again on their journey to El Dorado, the peacock palace, the dream of heaven, the dream of love on this brittle earth: “I saw with a thumping
impossible
heart I was reliving Donne’s first innocent voyage and journey into the interior country … [Donne] was glad for a chance to return to that first muse and journey … And with his miraculous return to his heart’s image and lust again, I saw – rising out of the grave of my blindness – the nucleus of that bodily crew … They had all come to me at last in a flash to fulfil one self-same early desire and need in all of us.”

What is the good of all this? Harris’s novels are just the thing if you find yourself suspended in a tide of
superficialities
, materialism, economic determinism, repetition,
division
and strife. Just the thing if the world seems flat and stale and you are afraid of undiscovered countries. Just the thing if you are so caught up in the day to day that you feel you are in danger of distrusting what is nebulous in your life and your self just because it is nebulous and unbound. We are made to look with fear and trembling on the devil called Donne because in this one body Harris locates so much of the cynicism, the self-destructive violence, the drive for power and possession, as well as the unacknowledged guilt and unhappiness of many people lost in the world today.

But Donne is not alone. The dreamer notices a frightening resemblance between Donne and Donne’s understudy, the bowman Wishrop, especially when the two are standing side by side. Almost at the same time, however, the Dreamer’s heart comes into his mouth because he is certain Donne was “myself standing outside of me while I stood inside of him”. As the book unfolds and spirals all the
characters
seem to be facets or aspects of Donne; at the same
time, every character seems to be a Donne in his own right. We know from the start that Donne and the dreamer are brothers or halves of the same person.

So if we concentrate on Donne and follow his story we can’t lose too much about the novel as a whole, and we stay constantly in tune with the ways in which the novel uses the convention of the individual character only to undermine it. More than any other Harris novel, this one uses all the
conventions
of the novel to undermine the conventions of the novel. A sense of place, a sense of history, recognisable
characters
, the language of ordinary people and linear structure are similarly treated. The ghosts of all of these devices serve necessary functions, but the book pretends not to need them. And ultimately doesn’t.

Harris’s work is one long endeavour to shake our
complacent
investment in our conditioned reality and especially the notion that the individual in “real life” is or can be
self-sufficient
. The human subject is not separate from other people, past, present and future. The human subject is haunted by ghosts resident in this place and in other places. He does not have an identity sealed off from other species or from the life of nature.

But listen to Donne’s thundering and you hear the
gun-talk
of a Caribbean familiar: “I tell you I fight everything in nature – flood, drought, chicken hawk, rat, beast and woman. I’m everything. Midwife, yes, doctor, yes, gaoler, judge, hangman, every blasted thing to the labouring people.” Donne utters this robber-talk when the Dreamer upbraids him for his exploitation of the folk and his abuse of the woman Mariella. Donne reminds his brother that life in an outpost of progress is tough. Once you have yielded to the heart of darkness that is imperial and colonial
exploitation
, you have to be a devil to survive.

Like many people who have had it hard, Donne has taken survival beyond the boundary and turned the quest for power and material security into a permanent cloak or
bullet-proof vest. His immigrant parents were farmers and hand-to-mouth business folk. They had had a hard life in the colony. When they died young, the forced-ripe Donne was obliged to take care of his brother the Dreamer.

But there is a fire in Donne that the increasingly timid, repressed and decent Dreamer longed to accommodate even as a child. A native of the Dreamer’s person, in fact, that would not accept the sentence and censure of education into self-control. Until Donne got himself expelled from school and joined up with a team of ranchers in the border country. “I had a curious sense of hard-won freedom when you had gone,” the Dreamer tells Donne. But the obsession never leaves him, and that is why he has come to the house Donne has constructed in the savannahs, the house from which he burned to rule the world.

Harris’s scrupulous tracing of the stages by which Donne entangles himself in the kingdom of this world holds the novel together, gives it recognisable reality. It is not difficult to understand Donne’s project to gain the whole world. It is the obsession of immigrants, men who come with nothing and think they are nothing.

Today men are buying up the island of Tobago, buying up Blanchisseuse, buying up Matura and other profitable choice sites in all the islands. Taking over banks. Rearing tourism hotels. Accumulating property to rent to embassies and foreign investors. Building access roads to plunder the land. It is the con-man version, the service-industry version, the insider-trading version, decadent forms of creativity, sad substitutes for the pioneering energy of a Donne or for the entrepreneurial spirit that took risks and built America.
Palace
of
the
Peacock
understands the perils facing exploiter and exploited in the past and now.

Donne is bold-faced and brazen with his materialism: “‘Now I’m a man. I’ve learnt‚’ he waved his hands at the savannahs, ‘to rule
this.
This is the ultimate. This is
everlasting
. One doesn’t have to see deeper than that, does one?’
He stared at me hard as death. ‘Rule the land‚’ he said, ‘while you still have a ghost of a chance. And you rule the world. Look at the sun.’ His dead eye blinded mine. ‘Look at the sun‚’ he cried in a stamping terrible voice.” Donne thinks he is fighting his way out of the economic nightmare that killed off his parents before they had a chance to live. He disputes that “these devils” (the Amerindians) have title to the savannahs and the region. “‘After all, I’ve earned a right here as well. I’m as native as they, ain’t I?’”

The Dreamer is repelled and fascinated by Donne’s fierce and uninhibited energy. The novel celebrates this energy and juxtaposes the amoral Donne with the Churchy,
frustrated
Dreamer. But it is not a case of Donne being evil and the Dreamer good. Better to be Donne or Sutpen or Faust than the Dreamer, actually. Donne, at least, is living!

Donne has several moments where he expresses
misgivings
about having become “the most violent taskmaster” and of being involved in “the most frightful material slavery”. He confesses that he drives himself “with no hope of redemption whatsoever” and would not be surprised if the Indians do him in. For a moment at any rate, he longs for release.

Harris uses the figure of Donne to present man in the rich welter of his material obsessions and spiritual drives, and to bring the reader closer to harmonising these. It is not
necessary
to worry about whether Donne is alive or saved at the end. And it is not fair to ask Harris to write a novel in which the characters live as ordinary people who have internalised the novels’ “vision of consciousness”. What happens to the figures in the novels happens for the reader’s benefit. It is the reader who becomes the characters. The characters can go hang when they are done. Donne is shot or hanged by Mariella.

Towards the end of
Palace
of
the
Peacock
,
Harris tries to write about how beautiful heaven can be. Donne and his crew come to the highest waterfall they have ever seen.
Astonished at “the immaculate bridal veil falling
motionlessly
from the river’s tall brink”, they abandon their boat and engine and begin ascending the cliff, mounting the steps and balconies that have been nailed with abandon from bottom to top. Donne comes to a window in the cliff and his eyes take in a vision of eternity in the glistening shimmering form of ancient everlasting mother and child. This is Harris describing the eternal with tranquillity and passion together. This is Harris trying to write about what happens in heaven. But you can’t look upon the glory of the Lord and escape unscathed. See what happens to the fierce conquistador: “Donne knew he was truly blind now at last. He saw nothing. The burning pain he felt suddenly in his eye extended down his face and along the column of his neck until it branched into nerves and limbs. His teeth loosened in their sockets and he moved his tongue gingerly along them. He trembled as he saw himself inwardly
melting
into nothingness and into the body of his death. He kept sliding on the slippery moss of the cliff and along columns and grease and mud. A singular thought always secured him to the scaffolding. It was the unflinching clarity with which he looked into himself and saw that all his life he had loved no one but himself.”

This is a dangerous passage because it could be used to reduce the book to a vulgar morality tale. The dissolution of the material Donne is not the climax but a preliminary stage. Harris is the first deconstructionist. But Caribbean
deconstruction
was never negative or cynical. All colonials have to deconstruct. All those people telling you who you are. People trying to Other you.
The
Secret
Ladder
describes in the clearest of terms the beginning of the post-colonial process of casting off what has been imposed. Russell Fenwick realises he is not really going mad in the bush: “Seven days it had taken to finish the original veil of creation that shaped and ordered all things to be solid in the beginning. So the oldest fable ran. Perhaps seven too were needed to strip and
subtilize everything … The seven beads of the original creation had been material days of efflorescence and bloom to distinguish their truly material character. But now the opposite realities of freedom were being chosen (not phenomena of efflorescence but shells and skeletons) to distinguish an immaterial constitution (which after all was the essential legitimacy of all creation).” That is what happens to Donne and the crew. The seven days up to Mariella are for deconstruction. The seven days after are days of re-construction.

In the final paragraph of
Palace
the reader realises that he is the Dreamer, and the novel he has just read is an
exploration
of his own journey towards resurrection.
Self-knowledge
and acceptance. Donne is part of the Dreamer, part of us. The whole crew including Donne are the humanity of the Dreamer come from the past to free him up into complexity. “I felt the faces before me begin to fade and part company from me and from themselves as if the need of one another was now fulfilled, and our distance from each other was the distance of a sacrament, the sacrament and embrace we knew in one muse and one undying soul. Each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever seeking and what he had eternally possessed.”

You may or may not be convinced by the novel’s attempt to take us back to the original moment of creation, to
sustainment
by the undivided soul and anima in the universe. But its psychological truth is inescapable: the Palace of the Peacock, El Dorado, call it what you will, is inside us.

Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in the former colony of British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before leaving for England in 1959 to become a full-time writer. His exploration of the dense forests, rivers and vast savannahs of the Guyanese hinterland features prominently in the settings of his fiction. Harris’s novels are complex, alluding to diverse mythologies from different cultures, and eschew conventional narration in favour of shifting interwoven voices. His first novel
Palace of the Peacock
(1960) became the first of
The Guyana Quartet,
which includes
The Far Journey of Oudin
(1961),
The Whole Armour
(1962) and
The Secret Ladder
(1963). He later wrote
The Carnival Trilogy
(
Carnival
(1985),
The Infinite Rehearsal
(1987) and
The Four Banks of the River of Space
(1990)). His most recent novels are
Jonestown
(1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones;
The Dark Jester
(2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel,
The Mask of the Beggar
(2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades,
The Ghost of Memory
(2006). Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature.